No Constant Thing
by polar-realm
Summary: Spock, Uhura and Gaila reconnect and heal in the aftermath of Vulcan. Spock/Uhura/Gaila, but no explicit content.


**No Constant Thing**

Disclaimer: Star Trek belongs to Gene Roddenberry, Paramount, etc., etc. I own nothing.

A/N: Title stolen from the song Guided by Wire, by Neko Case, which I also do not own, except in CD form.

* * *

Uhura is the first one to catch the transmission.

The Enterprise is too damaged to take part in the rescue efforts directly, but she's been working double shifts since the attack on Earth, scanning frequencies, giving and relaying orders, coordinating rescue efforts. She's pinpointed three damaged ships so far, all Vulcan, and several escape pods that had been lost among radiation and debris, but that isn't good enough. There are survivors out there still, dying by increments of cold or air loss or mechanical failure, and every minute matters. Every signal she catches counts. So she wraps herself up in data, searching and sifting, until there's nothing in her mind but charts and numbers and the the job in front of her. And – there. _There._

It's not a distress signal. It's almost nothing at all, barely strong enough to register, just a pulse of static rising and falling in rhythmic sequence.

"I have something," she says.

"That? That's not anything." One of the newly promoted comm technicians, leaning close over her shoulder, expressing a skepticism that she knows is not uncalled for. All of them have been grasping at shadows lately. But -

"Yes, it is."

Because she recognizes this message. Late night back at the Academy, patterns and codes of increasing complexity tapped out on walls and bedside tables, the giddiness of learning a new language and sharing a secret between friends, the subtler pull of a deeper secret still. _Remember this_, Gaila's hands had sung to her in the darkness, _we might need it one day_, and how she had laughed, not believing.

Now she translates in her head, feverishly, frantically, this code that no one else in the Federation has reason to know. _Here... Still alive..._and coordinates, repeating in a loop.

She relays the coordinates back to HQ and falls back in her chair, suddenly weary, torn between relief and fear and a hope so fierce it's almost painful. Resting now is not an option. There might be others out there still, and she's got no plans to stop searching until someone hauls her away from her station by force. But it's different now, with this new knowledge sitting snug in the back of her mind. Not certainty, but possibility. A chance.

_Hang in there, Gaila_,she thinks_. __We're going to get you home._

* * *

The journey back is surreal, marked by too-bright, too-sterile florescence and the tired hush that settles over everything when there is nothing left but to grieve and go on. She takes refuge in routine, fills every spare minute of her schedule with work and tries her hardest not to think about any of it too much. If she breaks under the strain of this, she'll take Spock spiraling down with her, she's sure of it. So she can't. So she doesn't.

He has nightmares.

Even in waking, he says, he finds it... difficult. He speaks calmly, as always, but in that word, that pause, that admission, she hears more grief than she has ever heard from anyone before. And in sleep his logic falters, and she cannot protect him from dreams.

They share quarters for the first time together on the long journey home, and she sees the way he tries to act on duty as if he hasn't been touched by his people's loss, holds himself stern and commanding and utterly uncompromised. It's a mask that never falls until the shift is long past over, and if she suspects how exhausting it is for him to maintain it, it isn't least because she's been wearing a few masks of her own. Survivor's guilt, they tell her, and for the first time in her life, putting words to something doesn't grant her the power to change it. She knows grief from the outside, theory and practice, but no amount of study could have prepared her for the way that it settles over her, in her, and no amount of rationality can make it release its hold.

And then there is the fact that Spock had been the one responsible for the ship assignments - that it had been his hand that marked the names of those who lived and those who died. It is not logical to feel guilt for that. He knows it. She knows it. Knowing changes nothing.

Each night she slips under the covers beside him and holds him until she feels the tension drain from his body and his breathing becomes easier, less rigidly controlled. She doesn't know if it helps or not, her body curled up against him in the empty hours, her fingers knit through his. She thinks it does, for both of them. But there are ghosts and there are memories, and neither are going to be leaving anyone in peace for a long time.

And then one day, a message comes through from San Francisco HQ, detailing the transmission she picked up: twelve cadets and five Vulcan survivors, found floating amid a cloud of debris. All are badly injured, the report says, but receiving medical treatment, with a high estimated probability of survival. She's gripping the PADD hard enough to hurt as she reads the list aloud, tastes the patterns of stress and intonation as she commits every name to memory.

_T'Kore__, _she whispers to herself._Day, Gupta, Ivanov. Selvek. Sveinnson._

Seventeen. Such a small number, measured against billions. But - _Garcia, T'Vana, Carpenter, Omotoso, Malik. _Familiar signifiers, their meaning arbitrary and indelible, running through her memory with the force and reverence of prayer. _Jimenez, Randall, Solin, Huang, T'San._

_Gaila._

_Gaila. Gaila. Gaila._

_

* * *

_

The survivors are in the hospital when the Enterprise pulls into orbit, and the first thing she wants is to see Gaila, to hear and touch and talk to her, convince herself once more that all of this is real. But of course that isn't how it goes. There are debriefing sessions first, meetings with the press, psych evaluations and counseling and more red tape than she really knows how to deal with right now. Protocols. She understands their value, abstractly.

That doesn't stop her from hating it. Doesn't change the fact that whenever anyone asks if she's alright, her first instinctive response is anger. Of course she's alright. _She_ didn't lose her life, her family, her homeworld. When she thinks about it coldly, clearly, she barely lost anything at all. What gives her the right to waste her time in mourning?

She's all right, she tells herself. She can deal with this. She _is_ dealing with this, and that's all there is to it.

* * *

No one should have been able to hold a wreck like that together.

That's what they all say later, the rescue crew who got a good look at the convoy of derelict ships and pieces of ships that they found on the edges of what had once been Vulcan space, drifting free with holes in the hulls and whole sections that had to be isolated due to vacuum or radiation. A floating death-trap armada with a little pack of survivors huddling together against the cold, led by one Orion engineer with all the skill and relentless, bloody-minded persistence needed to keep the wreckage and its inhabitants from spinning out into the dark.

After long range transmissions had failed to get through and the makeshift communications equipment they were using had crackled and died, Gaila had hung their lives on one last possibility. Uhura learns later that when there had been a choice between keeping the temperature stable and powering the transmitting device, Gaila had chosen to keep the signal going. A shot in the dark, dangerous but necessary. A gamble, and so much trust.

Even after the fact, the extent of that responsibility is almost overwhelming. The cadets they found out there had been half-dead from hypothermia and failing life support systems, and even a day longer might have been a day too long. If she hadn't been there that day, if she hadn't been listening... she doesn't like to think about it, but she can't stop it. Her thoughts keep returning and returning to the way it didn't happen.

She's heard that if you save one person's life, you become responsible for the rest of theirs. Uhura doesn't know that she agrees with that, and she does know Gaila wouldn't. She wouldn't like the idea of being anyone's responsibility, owing or being owed. Uhura gets that, inasmuch as anyone can. But she also gets the other thing now, too, that sense of holding someone's life in your hands, the stark, irrational dread that goes along with it.

But there's also something different than dread, stronger and deeper, running through her blood like a slow river. Seventeen names, etched on her memory, seventeen lives that have not been taken. One name, held safe and secret in the darkened places of her mind, and the tiny spark of something that she recognizes, in spite of everything else, as joy.

* * *

When they finally let her in to see Gaila, she knows what to expect, but she steps through the door and past the curtain and the reality hits her like a punch from an unexpected direction. All she knows is that Gaila is lying in a biobed, draped all in white sheets and hospital gown like a thin shroud, ghostly beneath bright florescent light. The once vibrant green of her skin is wan and pale, and she's too thin, almost emaciated, with dark, bruised-looking circles beneath her eyes. They've got her hooked up to half a dozen monitors, and she's all covered in bandages, with a tube of some clear fluid going into her arm. It hurts to look at her, but she's _alive_, and the next thing Uhura knows she's over by the hospital bed, and she's clutching Gaila's hand, trying so hard not to grip too tightly. And Gaila's hands are engineer's hands, rough and strong, but the bones of her fingers feel surprisingly light beneath the calloused skin. Impermanent. But Gaila's still here, and so is she, and they did win, and goddamnit, that _does_ matter.

Gaila smiles up at her and says, "I'll be back on my feet in no time, Nyota," and neither of them mentions Vulcan or the missing faces in the Academy halls, the memory of a planet ripped to pieces before their eyes. They don't talk about missing friends or nightmares, and they don't have to, because all of that is there and they _know_, and that means that just for now, they can let it go.

And then Gaila falls back on her pillow with a sigh, and it becomes obvious to Uhura exactly how much effort it had taken for her to hold her head up and her eyes open. She strokes Gaila's hair lightly, humming a soft lullaby, and it doesn't take long for her friend to drift back into sleep. She stays for a long time afterward, even so, trying to sort through the bittersweet tangle of emotions that seems to have taken root in her mind. There is work to be done, but that can wait, and she doesn't like the thought of Gaila waking up in the hospital with no one else around.

After that, she sits beside Gaila's hospital bed whenever duty permits, telling stories or reading aloud, talking about all the mundane details of daily life or just holding her hand and not saying anything at all. Spock is there with her when he can be, kneeling in meditation, watching the world from behind haunted eyes. He says little, these days, and speaks carefully, and there are times when he touches her mind and she feels nothing from him but an icy numbness. Not anger, not even sorrow. Just emptiness, all afterimage and echo, that strange, hollow absence that remains when the worst has come and gone and left you drifting in its wake.

But he is there, and there are other times when the darkness in his mind takes on a different quality, softer at the edges, a stillness more natural than forced. Those are times when she steps into their quarters to see him holding a holograph of Amanda loosely in his hands, or tending their small garden, filled with the same desert plants he had cultivated as a child, and she knows then that she hasn't lost him, that he isn't lost.

She mentions to him one day that Gaila is fond of wildflowers, the kind that grow tough and wild along sidewalks and roadsides, and the next time she visits there is a vase full of them on her friend's bedside table, a riot of reds and yellows and greens that eases something in her, wordless and elusive. Gaila has tiny desert marigolds woven into her hair that day, bright and glorious as sunbursts, and an image flashes through Uhura's mind of Spock kneeling by her bedside, slender fingers brushing out and braiding her hair, securing the flowers with meticulous precision.

She doesn't know what to make of it, really. That kindness is such an unassuming thing, so at odds with tragedy and history and destiny, all those old, portentous words. They don't fit in the same frame together. But Gaila is alive, and there are flowers in her hair. And she's beautiful, sharp and bright and not quite invincible but damn good at improvising when it matters, and right now she's the realest thing Uhura knows.

_Alive_, she thinks again, and feels their old shared language humming through her, wordless and infinitely precise, impossible to translate without something being lost.

"I missed you," she says. "We both did. I - "

It's surprising how difficult it is to force the words into order, no matter how clearly she knows what she means to say. Words have always come so easily to her, felt so fluid on her tongue. Now they catch in her throat, or slip through her grasp and away. She thinks about Spock, how he regrets not saying those words to one who always knew he felt them. But it isn't so simple, with Gaila. She speaks eighty-three percent of Federation languages, and she doesn't know how to say _I love you_ in a way that her friend won't hear as _I own you._ She never has, and so she never said it, but it hadn't seemed so important back then.

"We're glad to have you back," she says at last. "Both of us. I don't know if you know how much... how much it matters."

Gaila just looks at her for a moment, chewing absently on her bottom lip the way she does when confronted with a particularly tricky math problem or an unfamiliar machine.

"Nyota?" she says softly.

"Yeah?"

"I know."

Uhura squeezes her eyes shut, feels unshed tears burning behind them. She has no right, she thinks again. She has no right to mourn, she has no right to celebrate; that which is can only ever be what it is.

But she opens her eyes to the unforgiving brightness of hospital florescence and Gaila grinning up at her, and her breath catches and releases, leaving her empty and freer in its wake. For the first time since Vulcan, Lieutenant Uhura permits herself to cry.

* * *

"Is there anything we can get you?" she asks, once Gaila has the strength to do more than drift between sleep and waking.

"I imagine anything involving controlled substances is out of the question," Gaila says. She's propped up on one elbow, seemingly at ease, but Uhura can read restlessness in the way her eyes keep straying past her and over to the window or the door.

"Quite so," Uhura says. "And no explosives either, and definitely nothing interesting that runs on batteries."

"What about solar? Hikaru has this really impressive solar powered - "

"Whatever word you are about to say, I can guarantee you that I do not need to hear it."

"Model starfighter," Gaila says, arching one of her eyebrows in uncanny imitation of Spock. "What did you _think_ I was going to say?"

Uhura rolls her eyes in mock disapproval, and Gaila sticks out her tongue - a gesture that she adopted long ago with great enthusiasm - and for a moment it's almost like they're back at the Academy. It's all she can do to keep herself from grabbing a pillow and lobbing it at Gaila, or pinning her and tickling her until she dissolves into a fit of giggles. If Gaila hadn't been in convalescence, self-restraint and maturity would have gone out the window long ago.

"No solar powered _anything_," she says. "And no pollen, either, or medicinal herbs, no matter what else Sulu has in his stockpiles. The nurses have enough to deal with as it is."

"Something to read, then" Gaila says, "And... some kind of fruit, I think. Peaches, maybe. Fresh ones."

Peaches it is, then. Uhura has to smuggle them in, which isn't easy but is, on reflection, entirely worth the trouble. Gaila eats voraciously, wolfing down every single piece of fruit and licking juice from her fingers while Spock averts his eyes. Any other time, Uhura would have been amused by that - he's accidentally walked in on Gaila naked before and been entirely unfazed, but Vulcan modesty has its own unexpected manifestations. But right now all she can think of is how desperately she wants to keep both of them safe and whole, how much she would give or trade or steal to make everything right again.

Not that any of that matters. The universe doesn't take bargains, and if it did they wouldn't be fair ones, and Uhura isn't a fool. And she isn't Nero either, to imagine that life could ever pay for life. Sometimes things end, and you can't do anything to stop it. Sometimes that isn't the way it goes at all. She remembers a code picked out of the darkness, a woman on the other side of it fighting to survive, and knows that there's more to this than destiny or chance.

After Gaila sets her empty bowl aside, Spock hands her a PADD with all the most recent tech and engineering journals uploaded onto it. She beams at him like he's just given her the keys to the kingdom, which maybe he has. She starts reading through them, occasionally quoting a particularly interesting passage aloud. It isn't Uhura's primary field, but she has enough knowledge of electronics and computing to hold up her end of the discussion, so it's all wiring and circuitry for the next hour or so.

Spock listens, occasionally interjecting details or arguing some abstract point, but mostly keeping to the sidelines. It has been a long time since any of them have stood on formality, but there is nevertheless something reserved in the way he sits, back straight and hands folded, a distance that speaks more to her of contemplation than lack of feeling. She recognizes his old tendency to deal with uncertain situations by turning his attention inward, and wonders what it is that he's holding in his mind right now. Not Vulcan-that-was, she thinks. Not that which cannot be changed. Something different.

She reaches out and he reaches back, and this time, the telepathic connection hums with an unexpected resonance. She catches the echo of what she feels for him, and for Gaila, an electric current of intermingled love and companionship and desire. It isn't simple, exactly, but there's no room for jealousy either, no possession or need for control. Just uncertainty, the slightest touch of doubt and the tentative shape of a question, asked and answered in the gap between seconds. Uhura reaches across to Gaila with her other hand, palm out up and open. Halfway only - an offer, not an assumption. This decision is Gaila's.

She makes it without hesitation, gripping Uhura's hand tightly, and the smile that lights her face is half challenge and half conspiracy. Spock holds two fingers out towards her, and she responds in kind, pulling him into the circle as if none of them have ever been anywhere else.

* * *

The day the doctors finally pronounce Gaila well enough to be released, Uhura and Spock are both free, and Uhura cannot help but feel a twinge of gratitude for that. It wouldn't feel right, one of them not being there. They're letting her out ahead of schedule, and Uhura suspects some interference from McCoy, possibly by way of the newly promoted Captain James T-for-trouble Kirk. Those two both know Gaila better than Starfleet Medical ever will, and think what she will of him, Jim especially knows that there's more to healing than deep tissue regenerators and hyposprays. Uhura makes a silent resolution to find out later, and find some way to repay their understanding. She does pay her debts, after all. That's one thing she and Gaila have always had in common.

She offers Gaila an arm for support and they all walk slow and cautious out the hospital doors, down the path through the center of campus, until they reach a place sheltered by a tall, branching elm tree, and Gaila says "Stop."

Uhura does, and Gaila steps away from her support, across that thin sharp line between sunlight and shade. She's still shaky on newly healed legs, tired from the walk, but she keeps her balance until she reaches the trunk of the tree and leans against it, hands pressed against rough bark, eyes falling closed for a moment as she breathes out. Then she sinks down onto her knees, curls her fingers in wet grass and dirt, her red curls falling loose and tangled over her shoulders.

At first, Uhura doesn't know whether to sit down beside her or give her space, but she looks up and pats the ground beside her in invitation. So Uhura sits, and Gaila shifts closer, leaning comfortably against her like a sister or a lover, someone who knows that she belongs. Uhura wraps an arm around her shoulder, smelling crushed grass and the remnants of rain, and the familiar scent of Gaila's skin and pheromones, the one alphabet that she has never been able to translate.

Spock hesitates for a minute before joining them, holding on a little longer to his habitual distance. Then he is kneeling down beside them both, his eyes dark and mercurial in an expressionless face, and Gaila takes his hand and presses the tips of his fingers to her lips, briefly, gently. And they just sit like that, in the shadow of the tree with sunlight filtering down and spilling golden around them, all tangled in each others' arms. One world lost and one world saved, and no, it doesn't ever balance. But there is still this, here, now. There is peace and something still unbroken, and she wants it to last.

She feels tears on her cheeks, the heat of Spock's body pressed against her back and Gaila in her arms, and she thinks she wouldn't mind if time slipped loose from its anchor and left them untethered here. That isn't the way things go either, and even if it could be, none of them would want it to. Not really. But it's nice to be able to rest for a bit, let the day flow over them and leave the ghosts to mind themselves for a while. Not forever, she thinks, running her fingers lazily through Gaila's hair. Just for now.

She knows the warmth and roughness of Gaila's palm in her hand, the sweet, teasing mischief in her eyes. She knows the slight tilt of Spock's head, the reserved courtesy and the discipline he holds to, these things held constant over a sea of deeper, wilder emotion. There are old shadows following both of them, and older dreams, and all three of them have been born to fly. And she knows the thread that binds them all together, in code and word and blood. It feels like sorrow, and reprieve. It feels like promise.

It isn't everything. Uhura knows that. But for now, she thinks it just might be enough.


End file.
